The Business Of Blogging

ROBYN A. FRIEDMAN Technology

February 20, 2006|ROBYN A. FRIEDMAN Technology

It should come as no surprise to anyone who surfs the Net that blogs, or Weblogs, are booming. Click onto any number of consumer or business Web sites, and you're likely to see the opinions of the site owner posted prominently in his or her blog. But blogs aren't just wildly popular; they're big business as well.

San Francisco-based Technorati Inc. doesn't just track blogs; it provides a search engine for them as well. Similar to Google's Blog Search, Technorati's search engine helps Web surfers locate blogs that might interest them. After all, it's easy to post a blog on your Web site; it's another thing to have people actually be able to locate it in cyberspace to read it.

About every quarter, Technorati issues a report it calls the "State of the Blogosphere." The latest was issued on Feb. 6, and the statistics it cited are pretty incredible.

The number of Web logs that Technorati is currently tracking -- 28 million -- has doubled since July 2005. More amazing, Technorati reports that the blogosphere -- the total number of blogs in cyberspace -- is now 60 times bigger than it was just three years ago, with over 75,000 new Web logs created every day.

"Every time I release the State of the Blogosphere report, I keep thinking that it can't double again -- that would be just crazy," said David L. Sifry, Technorati's chief executive officer. "But for the past 21/2 years that I've been doing the report, the blogosphere has continued its pace of doubling about once every 51/2 months."

Several factors are driving the blog boom. According to the Yankee Group, a Boston-based business technology consulting firm, the increasing penetration of broadband services has helped pave the way for consumers to explore new online applications. Media attention to blogs has increased as well, thereby spurring consumer interest. Yankee Group also said that consumers are trying to personalize the Internet with their blogs as well, and with blogging tools becoming more user-friendly on Web sites such as MSN, AOL, Yahoo and Google, it's now fast, easy and cheap to broadcast one's opinions on the Web.

Businesses, too, have jumped onto the blog bandwagon, using them for everything from targeted marketing to advertising, product promotions, research and testing new ideas.

But despite their usefulness and popularity, blogs do have their drawbacks. "While there are millions of bloggers, there are only a handful -- a few thousand at most -- who have a sizable audience," said B.L. Ochman, a blog strategy consultant based in New York.

Ochman said that many companies are bypassing the traditional media -- newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc. -- to take their message directly to the public through blogs. But blogs that aren't well-written or researched will simply be ignored.

While Ochman said that blogs are not a fad, but a long-term trend, she and Sifry say that the exponential growth cannot continue.

"There are only so many human beings on the planet," Sifry said. "You cannot continue to double every six months or so and expect that trend to continue. It's impossible."

Robyn A. Friedman is a freelance writer. Send tips to her at technologycolumn@gmail.com.